Earlier this year the Israel PTO announced that it would be inaugurating a new PCT patent prosecution highway (PCT-PPH) program.
With itself.
Seriously.
Henceforth, if one of the claims of your PCT application is searched by the ISA/IL or examined by the IPEA/IL and found to be novel and have inventive step, you can have the examination of your national phase application expedited.
What a ground-breaking, non-obvious policy decision: the ILPTO will recognize its own work product, at least for accelerating the examination of national phase applications. Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Considering that at the moment, only Israeli nationals can use the ILPTO as an ISA or IPEA, it’s a mystery why this needed to be announced as a PPH initiative, rather than in the context of (yet another) Commissioner’s circular.
This new policy initiative might be really impressive had the Commissioner not subsequently announced that the ILPTO won’t recognize its own (or anyone else’s) PCT examination work for substantive examination purposes. But that’s going to be the topic of another blog post.